The Goggle Bob Blog

Tag Archives: fox kids

Gaming has changed a lot over the years. Nowadays, if a game is released for multiple systems, it is almost always the exact same game across different platforms, give or take a random feature or frame rate. Skyrim has been released for… let me do the math here… 70,000 videogame systems, and, by and large, every version has been, ya know, Skyrim. If there were some variation in there, you better believe you’d see promotion for the brand new Skyrim Jr., Skyrim Babies, or Skyrim: Centaurs Among Us editions. You buy Skyrim, you get Skyrim, and whether your buddy has an Xbox or Playstation, you’re both talking about the same dragonborn at the end of the day.

Back in the 90’s, things were not so simple.

We consider them members of the same console generation, but the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo videogame consoles were wildly different systems. For one thing, Super Nintendo had Chrono Trigger and Super Metroid, while Sega Genesis had Ecco the Dolphin. Ha ha! I’m joking, because I was primarily a Nintendo kid, and I absolutely will never get over those console wars. I lost good friends to that battle, and I’m not going to let young Jason’s sacrifices (he had a subscription to Sega Visions) be in vain. And why were there such console wars? Well, mostly because of advertising. But! Another significant factor was that a number of games for both systems were as different as their base consoles, so you could experience entirely different playstyles if you decided to pick up a title for Sega or Nintendo. Back then, even a humble Looney Tunes spin-off could be the spark that reignites the blaze of war.

Taz-Mania was always an odd duck. For reasons that I’m sure annoy tattoo artists to this very day, Taz the Tazmanian Devil became extremely popular in the early 90’s. This also roughly coincided with the rise of WB/Fox Kids animation domination, so, hot on the heels of Tiny Toons and just before the rise of Animaniacs, Taz got his own animated variety sitcom. This was… an odd choice. Taz was always popular for his general unleashed, unhinged, and non-verbal personality… so naturally they gave him a loving, perfectly normal nuclear family. Jean Tazmanian Devil is a dedicated housewife, and Hugh Tazmanian Devil is a Bing Crosby wannabe perfect father. Molly and Jake are archetypal siblings, and Dog the Turtle is a typical dog (who is a turtle). Basically, Warner Bros. Animation crafted an amusing farce where a feral beast is forced to live with a modern family that inexplicably and unconditionally loves the destructive eating machine. … And it suddenly becomes clear where my generation earned its absurdist sense of humor. Regardless, Taz was joined by a few other characters/shorts (because WB Animation seemed to assume that kids have the collective attention span of a particularly excited chihuahua), so even the main appeal of its chief character was lost for entire segments at a time. For a series that was ostensibly created to capitalize on Taz-mania (oh, I just got that), it sure took a weird route to get there.

But, like the Addams Family before it, it was considered a popular enough show to earn a videogame or two. The first release was Taz-Mania for the Sega Genesis. And, lo, it was good! As one might expect from the era, Taz-Mania was a 2-D platforming adventure featuring Taz questing after a giant egg, because eating things is funny. And Taz-Mania properly featured Taz’s excessive gluttony in other ways, too! Taz would devour anything he could fit in his giant maw, which included food, 1-ups, monsters, and even entire water bottles (he drank the water first, naturally). This even became an interesting gameplay wrinkle, as there were items like bombs and weed killer strewn about, and they could be used as items, but only if you made Taz resist devouring them outright. Fun fact: weed killer is not a balanced part of a tazmanian devil’s diet. Beyond that, this was a gorgeous, fairly basic 2-D platformer, and the goal was to jump on everything from here to the end of the stage. You could even use Taz’s whirly attack every once in a while… but it’s generally not recommended, as it will absolutely get you killed.

Which was kind of the problem: Taz-Mania was super hard.

With save states and other modern innovations, the scope of Taz-Mania is easy to see. However, back in the day, this was a pretty basic platformer for a few levels, and then a series of instant death traps that would banish the player back to Level 1 pretty quickly. In fact, you could easily point toward one single mid-level stage, a freaking a mine cart level, that is a wall-to-wall Taz slaughter. No devils have any hope to survive, and the mere concept of reaching later stages is nothing more than a pipedream. There are a few other sticking points (floating logs introducing perspective to a 2-D game is particularly cruel), but, short of rote memorization, there was no way Taz was going to make it past some terrible mines. Not that the end game is that exciting! But not knowing how Taz’s adventure ends (it’s a fight against a giant seagull, ‘natch) might convince a poor Genesis kid that a purchase is better than a rental. Well played, Sega, well played.

And then, a scant few months later, Sunsoft released its version of Taz-Mania on the Super Nintendo. It was dramatically easier, and, incidentally, boring as hell.

You will never be able to convince me that Taz-Mania (SNES) did not start as a Wily E. Coyote game that was randomly modified to be a Taz-Mania tie-in. This title plays vaguely like SNES Mario Kart, and takes full advantage of Mode 7 capabilities to place Taz on an endless stretch of highway where he must catch kiwis (the highly mobile birds, not the much easier to catch fruit). Every level contains an escalating number of kiwis, and there are few hazards (like buses and… mostly just buses) to keep Taz down. After catching the requisite kiwis, Taz falls asleep, the kiwis escape his gaping maw (that’s how digestion works, right?), and the whole thing starts again. Repeat for five acts (worlds) with three stages each. Throw in a few bonus stages where you can catch infinity kiwis for a score that impacts nothing, and you’re got the entire game.

And, in this case, that’s the clear problem: after playing a whole one stage, you’ve seen everything this title has to offer. Later stages seem to climb in difficulty only by adding incredibly unfair traps (arrows will spawn practically on top of Taz, and presumably you’re supposed to dodge them by using psychic powers), but it’s mostly moot anyway, as devouring practically anything (including your kiwi goals) refills your health. Like the endless stretch of highway to which Taz has been sentenced, the game is just an interminable slog of the initial stage repeated a solid fifteen times. Backgrounds change, sometimes you see the Road Runner, and occasionally you’ll earn a powerup that makes Taz move slightly faster, but other than that, it is tedium. It’s tremendously more beatable than its Genesis cousin, but even the first act makes it clear that there’s no future for this Taz. It’s the exact same plot across both games (Taz hungry), but there is exactly zero reason to progress through the SNES version.

So who wins? Guess it depends on your mood. SNES-Mania is basically an endless runner (almost literally), and is good, repetitive fun if you’re in the mood for such a thing (the sales on mobile games seem to indicate this is true of at least some people). On the other (brown, furry) hand, you’ve got Genesis-Mania, which is a creative, intricate platformer that requires endless memorization or a healthy glut of cheating. It’s (God help me) the Dark Souls of 90’s WB Animation Game Tie-ins. So, in this situation, it’s like comparing apples and oranges, and one could no more declare a winner than objectively determine that ducks are more suited for space travel than vegemite. In this situation, both systems have their own, personal Tazs, and that’s just fine.

Which is nice for Sega, because the SNES wins at everything else.

FGC #371 Taz-Mania (Sega Genesis) & Taz-Mania (SNES)

System: Sega Genesis for the platformer, SNES for the runnin’ of the Taz. The Genesis game was compromised and ported to Master System and Game Gear, too. Also, there was a Gameboy version that had nothing to do with anything.

Number of players: Single player across the board. The SNES version could easily have had a head-to-head kiwi catching contest, but noooooo.

Favorite Level (SG): It’s a shame that the final area of Genesis-Mania is so difficult to reach, as its “ancient ruins” aesthetic is great for the level design, and contains a number of gags that indicate Taz’s ancient ancestors were just… Taz. He’s perennial!

Favorite Level (SNES): There is no way to tell these stages apart, and I will not entertain notions of trying.

Let’s Talk Cartoons: Given the choice, I’d take Taz-Mania the Series over a number of its descendants, like Histeria!, Animaniacs, and a third one that I know I’m forgetting. Freakazoid is the best, but Taz’s general… Tazness fit the variety show format well. Also, I really enjoy orange juice, and no one understands when I make that Hugh reference anymore.

Did you know? Genesis-Mania contains a complete debug cheat, which allows for level skipping, invincibility, and instant health restoration. SNES-Mania simply contains a level select code. Welp, I know one place where the Genesis version excels.

Would I play again: SNES version isn’t happening again, as I’m not one for score-based games. Genesis version is a maybe, but only with the assistance of save states and such. Or… probably not ever, because there are better games available in both genres. Sorry, guess the Taz stays in Taz-Mania.

What’s next? Our next SNES/Genesis matchup is… Billy and the Clone-Osaurus! There’s a park full of dinosaurs, and I guess we’re trying to escape it for some reason! Please look forward to it!

The problem with pets is that there is a lack of communication. Yes, your average dog is confident in his good boyhood, and your average cat is well aware that you are a willing slave to the feline oligarchy, but relaying more precise concepts is very difficult. Yes, you, human, are yelling… but… why? Is it because food is late? Is it because good boy did not sniff enough telephone poles? Or is it somehow related to how that pillow had to be dismantled, piece by piece, because it might contain angry ghosts? And, of course, all of the other pillows had to be destroyed, because, come on, you can’t leave a job unfinished. Is that why yelling is happening? No, it’s probably that sniffing thing. That seems like the most important item of the day.

Unfortunately, videogames are much in the same boat. Mass Effect Andromeda was a failure. But why? Was it the graphics? The sound effects? An uninteresting and unsightly plot? Not enough homosexual scenarios available? An odd subliminal message that pops up every thirty seconds that reads “Trump for President” despite the fact that the game was released like six months after the election? It’s literally impossible to point to one distinct reason a particular videogame failed, and you average gamer isn’t much help in that regard, either. “It sucked,” is not constructive criticism! Not that the marketing department is ever going to listen anyway, they’re still too busy insulting review aggregator sites to notice why their game might not be scoring a passing grade. Once again, there is a lack of communication between the people that want something and the folks that can actually do something about it.

This is why the playtesting phase of any given videogame production is so important. There were maybe two games produced in the last three decades that significantly changed after a demo/release thanks to “player feedback”, so it seems obvious to the layman that programmers and other creators behind our favorite medium won’t change much once it’s “out in the wild”. But in-house playtesting can reveal much that a programmer too close to a project may have missed. Like, ya know, when an entire level doesn’t work. Yes, it’s very easy for us to note glitches and flaws well after the fact, but who knows how many problems have been preemptively fixed by diligent playtesters (and the design teams that actually listen to said test dummies). And, come on, videogames are meant to be played. Nobody wants to play a game of conceptual dodge ball; when you’ve got a game in front of you, you want to know someone played and enjoyed it before you. Tried and true and tested, that’s the sure route to fun.

And it’s very clear that THQ didn’t hire a single playtester back in the 90’s.

THQ, one way or another, is responsible for publishing a number of games for the original Nintendo console. We’ve got such luminaries as Home Alone, Swamp Thing, and (the only videogame I know of based on a friggen’ series of art books) Where’s Waldo. THQ itself came from the world of toy manufacturing (Toy Headquarters, Toy HQ, THQ), so it seems only natural that their plan for the NES, the “hot toy” of the 80s, would be to adapt every available children’s property into a digital format. You make your action figures for James Bond Jr., then you make a corresponding game, and then you have pillow fights with supermodels in your money bin. Licensing has always been the same, and a Home Alone tie-in novel or board game can’t be that different from an accompanying videogame. All works out identical in the end.

And, while it’s easy to say THQ had no vested interest in advancing the medium or making videogames a household name or whatever lofty goals you could likely attribute to the likes of Nintendo or Konami, you must admit that THQ did want to be successful. After all, why make videogames if not to sell videogames? In every medium going back to cave drawings, there has been a clear line connecting “success” and “quality”. Okay, wait, that might be a lie. But even artists not appreciated in their time were able to sell the occasional bit of scribbling, and they didn’t need the Wayne’s World license to do it. You can make a licensed game and a good game at the same time! Capcom did it often! And they were rewarded for it! You can do it, too, THQ!

Fox’s Peter Pan and the Pirates, THQ’s first ever release, seems to prove that THQ was never interested in creating a game that was capable of being enjoyed.

Peter Pan could be an interesting character for a 2-D platformer. In fact, Kirby with a sword basically is Peter Pan. Fly, slide, slash, and maybe make some manner of rooster sound. Battle through woods, coves, and pirate brigades, and avoid a crocodile along the way. Faeries are already an established powerup, and heck, if you want to really go nuts, you could include some kind of “duel” mini-mode like certain other releases. Peter Pan is all about an action-loving teenager with unparalleled movement capabilities and an established antagonist that just happens to have his own infinite army of mooks. Every videogame title should just be Peter Pan!

But Fox’s Peter Pan and the Pirates manages to squander everything fun about Peter Pan within its opening level. Peter Pan has a sword! Or dagger! Something pointy! Unfortunately, it’s about the same length as a twinkie, so we’re stuck with the raw damage potential of a 2-D Hylian that managed to leave all of his magic skills at home. But Peter Pan isn’t about stabbing! He’s about flying! And… that is difficult to control. And hitting any one of the bizarre, poorly-defined hitboxes of enemy or platform alike will cause Pete to drop like a dead fairy. Oh, and all flight is limited by a fairy dust counter, because I guess Peter Pan only has so much happiness in his cold, black heart. Wendy appears once to say watch out for snakes, Tinker Bell is nothing more than a health fill-up, and there are warp mushrooms that will randomly toss you somewhere in the stage. It’s all extremely underwhelming, and a complete waste of a decent license.

And then it somehow gets worse.

FPPatP is an old school NES game, so that means three lives and no continues. Considering the length of the first stage and the sheer number of deadly pterodactyls contained therein, it would not be a stretch to claim that many kids never made it past the first stage. Oh, and the game requires you kill every rando pirate in every level, so if you did manage to get to the end, it was likely you were sent back to start because you didn’t nail a Smee. Anyone lucky enough to find stage 2 would then discover a level that is primarily pits and traps, so, uh, good luck with that and Peter Pan’s overly finicky flight skills. I would estimate that, just spitballing, of all the poor children that got stuck with this abomination, probably only about 3% ever saw the third level. Beyond that? That’s just impossibility.

And, while I’m applying this thinking to the poor saps that wound up with this lesser Barrie adaptation under the Christmas tree, it’s pretty clear that the playtesters didn’t get very far either. The controls are already terrible, but something is seriously wrong when the fourth stage is simply a recolor of the first. Though, it was the NES age, one might expect that echelon of cost cutting. What’s the next level?

Oh God! What horrible Virtual Boy preview hath THQ wrought!? There is no way a single human being saw that color scheme (red on red on red on… maybe brown?) and thought, “Yes, this is something that should be unleashed upon children.” Hell, had a parent’s organization even been in the same zip code as that stage, we’d see a complete ban of all videogames as early as 1991. Oh, yeah, did I forget to mention that this hunk of trash was a contemptuous contemporary of Mega Man 4, Metal Storm, and Battletoads? This was seven years after Urban Champion, and someone thought it was okay.

And then the final level is the same stupid level repeated three times in a row, followed by a final boss fight that is simultaneously impossible, difficult, and as boring as counting rice grains. Your reward for completing the game is one lousy bitmap of Peter Pan and the message that “It is so much fun being Peter Pan”.

No.

No it is not.

Was Fox’s Peter Pan and the Pirates a success for THQ? Signs point to no. It probably sold a decent enough number of copies (currently available at around $30 for complete in box, so there is likely a lot of this trash out in the world), but no one ever lists this 2 star (out of a possible million) title on their “best of” or “fond childhood memories” list. This game was crap, and it bombed because it was crap. Was there any way to relay this information to THQ, though? Of course not. Whaddya gonna do, write a blog post about it?

So, anyway, if anyone from early 90’s THQ can read this… Uh, your game sucked. Just a head’s up.

Bad, THQ. Bad.

FGC #343 Fox’s Peter Pan and the Pirates

System: Nintendo Entertainment System. Please do not look for virtual console releases, as Disney has stomped this version of the franchise out of the universe.

Number of players: The other Lost Boys are completely absent. Seriously. Don’t think they even get a mention. I guess they’re…. lost.

Foxy: “Fox’s” Peter Pan and the Pirates was a Saturday morning television show on Fox. Okay, you probably guessed that. Fox managed to outbid Disney for the license just this once, and made a surprisingly trippy cartoon series out of the whole deal. The Peter Pan nonsense was pretty tiresome, but there was a surprising amount of attention paid to (actually competent) Captain Hook and his pirate crew. Oh, and one time Wendy’s daughter from the future showed up, and Sailor Moon has taught me that that trope is always cool.

Say something nice: Unusual for a platformer, your health is a number in this adventure. And even more unusual, your health doesn’t seem to have an upper limit. So, assuming you stay out of the jaws of a crocodile, you should have practically unlimited health by the final boss. Or you’ll have practically nothing because of a random instant death trap. One or the other.

Did you know? Fox’s Peter Pan made Tinker Bell a redhead and the smartest of the Lost Boys. Disney’s Tinker Bell is a jackass.

Would I play again: And be the first person in history to play this game twice? Never.

Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure is a videogame based on the highly popular (with 90’s kids that watched Fox) series, Tiny Toon Adventures. While it would make perfect sense for this game to be fairly original, bad news, this is yet another fuzzy mascot Sonic-alike for the Sega Genesis. The NES got a couple of interesting platformers, the SNES got a TTA adaption that had no idea what it wanted to be (“Am I… playing football now?”), and the Genesis got a Sonic the Hedgehog wannabe. This is how the world works.

But, thanks to poor scheduling compliments of my daffy plucky robot, I managed to play this game between sessions of Sonic Mania. This does nothing for a Sonic-alike game, but it does give me an excuse to elucidate why Sonic Mania works without having to actually “review” that game. Hooray! So let’s all enjoy a quick list of things that absolutely do not work in Sonic-ish games.

Hit Points are the Enemy

To this very day, everyone claim’s Sonic’s one major innovation was speed. He’s gotta go fast, etc. etc. But the speed is a lie! Yes, it’s cool to run through loops and barrel along like you’re a living rolling coaster, but even in the best Sonic games, that barely lasts past the first level. Then we’ve got a host of lava rivers, watery labyrinths, and a maybe an airship or two. Want to know what happens when you try to run at top speed on a high altitude platform with no guardrails? Spoilers: it ends with your femur being found in another county.

The real innovation of Sonic is the one thing everyone takes for granted: rings. With just a single ring, Sonic is invincible! Or… at least he won’t die after a tap from a giant egg robot. And that makes all the difference! As long as you’ve got a ring (which is easily obtainable… anywhere), life is wonderful, and you can run around like an idiot with zero repercussions. It’s the joy of Sonic: just run and run and run, and if you hit an obstacle, no big deal, you’ll survive to run again. You only need worry when you’re down to zero rings, and, well, if you’ve let that happen, you probably did something wrong. Were you not moving fast enough? It was probably that.

Buster of Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure tries to emulate the Sonic “gotta go fast” formula, but with basic hit points. On one hand, yes, it would have been a little too obvious if Buster collected trails of “carrots” and had to maintain a single veggie to avoid death at all times, but… that would have been so much better. Buster has 3 HP, which means the game always flows like this:

You have full health, hooray, run around like a coked up rabbit.

You have lost a health point, not good, but survivability is still possible.

You have 1 HP remaining. Life is pain. Now please move as slow as possible, because one more hit means…

Death

Repeat

Every single level works out like this, because nobody wants to repeat a stage thanks to one random misplaced frog. Life is hunky dory while the health is topped off, and everything slows to a depressing crawl when hearts are a scarce resource. A game plainly made for running is no fun when you’re creeping along at Bookworm’s pace.

Rings are the thing, and their only natural enemies are…

Instant Kill Traps are the Worst

Let’s be clear here: there is a difference between an “instant kill hazard” and an “instant kill trap”. On one hand, you have something like a pit. You see the pit, you know that the pit is going to kill you if you fall in there, and, thus, you do everything to navigate your digital avatar around/over said pit. That is a hazard, and, while it means instant death regardless of health/rings, it’s a clear and present threat, and the challenge is in discovering how to overcome this problem. An instant kill trap, meanwhile, is the inevitable result of going fast in an area where there are A. pits B. spikes, or, my personal favorite C. things that make you go squish. This is horrible, because it punishes the player for doing the one thing that feels fun in these games (gotta go ____).

Sonic Mania is wonderful about this, because it almost never deliberately routes a fun, spring powered bit of blast processing right into an immediate death (I say “deliberately” because there are more than a few squishy deaths that seem rather… accidental). This is in sharp contrast to every other 2-D Sonic game for the last twenty years. Sonic Rush decided to stick a bottomless pit every seven steps, and Sonic Rivals was far too fond of vast chasms of gaping death. The Advance series mitigated this somewhat with multiple paths, and remembering to always “stay up” was a route to redemption. But honorary bad Sonic game Buster’s Hidden Treasure sticks to only one route, and it’s one fraught with instant death. The second “world” starts with a drop that seems survivable… until you watch helplessly as Buster is crushed by an insurmountable slab of moving granite. Whoops, sorry you didn’t intuitively know this was an instant death trap! Please try again!

And while we’re talking about instant death nonsense…

Never have a “chase” boss

It’s easy to see the confusion here: you want a villain that compliments the hero’s powerset. Batman needs a villain he can outwit. Goku needs a villain he can outpunch. And, when you’ve got a hero that has a power that can be described as “I like to run”, then you need a villain that can be outrun. This stands to reason, and, conceptually, makes a lot more sense than how Sonic, the fastest furball on two legs, defeats all his opponents by bouncing off of ‘em like some manner of plumber.

However, with the possible exception of racing games, “chase” bosses and challenges are terrible. This is because a chase is basically a race, and there are only so many ways you can make a race consistently entertaining/interesting. Too much of a gulf between first and second place? Boring. Both racers aren’t even on the same screen? Boring. There are hazards on the track, but the racers are ignoring them? Totally boring. So, naturally, most chase bosses spice things up with rubber band AI, impossible-to-predict traps, and our old friend instant death loss conditions. It doesn’t end well.

What’s the one part of Sonic Mania that everyone is complaining about? The chase/race against Mecha Sonic. Same for Sonic Generations and its ridiculous “rival” races. Same for Buster’s Treasure Hunt and the final race against Elmyra. None of this is fun, and, while it is thematically appropriate, none of it is any better than the average “bop a boss” playstyle. There might not be much reason for Sonic or Buster to have a damaging hop attack, but it sure does beat another Turbo Tunnel wannabe.

Nobody likes Spelling Errors

Look, this is really simple, it’s spelled “You’re”…

And who knows where this whole “Eggman” thing came from, but it’s spelled “Robotnik”. Is it that hard to get the little things right?

And I guess that’s the moral here. Anyone can make a Sonic-alike game, but the little details are what is most important. If you don’t cross your t’s and dot your bottomless pits, you’re going to have a bad time. Making a good Sonic game isn’t impossible, you just have to follow a few rules. Get through that, and the good stuff will go fast.

FGC #324 Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure

System: Sega Genesis. Again, this game is entirely different from Tiny Toon Adventures on other consoles of the time.

Number of players: Could have wedged Babs Bunny (no relation) in there as a second player, but no, it’s one player.

Speaking of which: This is another game based on a kid’s property where the entire female cast gets sidelined for no good reason. Babs, Shirley, and Fifi are all kidnapped during the opening narration, and, while the boys are fought as (mind controlled) bosses, the female cast is stuck bound and gagged for the entirety of the adventure. Lame! I guess this means the only girl that appears during actual gameplay is Elmyra. What a pain.

Favorite Boss: Gene Splicer (who appeared in like two episodes of Tiny Toons, but somehow every videogame port) is technically 90% of the bosses in this game, but he’s usually joined by a brainwashed toon. As per videogame adaptation tradition, Dizzy Devil is the first and probably best boss. The rest of them are… remarkably boring. Hampton Pig attacks with a vacuum cleaner? Who thought that was a good idea?

Other problems: The final world has one of those areas where magical doors might send you to the next area or back to the beginning of the stage. This isn’t really a Sonic problem, but I feel I should note that the platformer teleporter maze is one of the worst things ever.

Did you know? Little Sneezer is one of the assist characters in Buster’s Hidden Treasure. Many people believe Sneezer is the protégé of Speedy Gonzales, but, no, he’s actually supposed to be a match for another obscure Looney Tunes character, Sniffles. Speedy Gonzales actually matches up to Lightning Rodriguez, a character that doesn’t really exist.

Would I play again: This is my least favorite Tiny Toons title. Yes, that includes that one Mario Paint wannabe game. So that’s a no.

What’s next? Random ROB has chosen… Wizards and Warriors 3 for a live stream tonight! Be back here around nine or so for a live play through of one of the worst games of my childhood. Please look forward to it!

I like superheroes. I know I’m not alone in this, because I’m pretty sure any film starring Robert Downey Jr. is currently making more money than every single human in Macedonia combined (and a few of the particularly skilled dogs, too). It’s reached the point that, even on this very blog, when I’m talking about “comics”, I mean “the big two companies publishing superhero comics”, and not, say, some graphic novel about taking care of elderly relatives or scoring blankets in the Middle East or whatever is cool in the indie scene right now. I like my weekly comics to be about one thing: grown men punching each other for the slightest of reasons. And, again, I know I’m not the only one, because I just watched a movie where a magic man puts on a super cape and turns an angry German to dust. That doesn’t happen outside of superhero comics and/or Harry Potter novels (or comic books about Harry Potter novels).

Given I am clearly an adult child, you might be under the mistaken impression that I’ve been reading comic books as long as I’ve been able to decipher a thought bubble. And, while it’s true that I’ve been reading comics of various kinds for years, I actually never had a subscription or frequent exposure to the big Marvel or DC titles when I was a wee Goggle Bob. This was because, predominantly, the only comic book shop in the area was filled with sweaty nerds, and even I, a proto-sweaty nerd, found the place to be rather… repellant. As a result, I rarely ever had any new comics, and predominantly only saw an issue when my family went on vacation, and I was gifted an issue of X-Men for the long car ride. Do you know how long it takes to drive from Jersey to Florida? Longer than it takes to read one comic book, dad.

But you may be asking, “Hey, wait a tick. If you never got any comic books, then how did you know you wanted an X-Men comic? Was that the only comic book at the supermarket checkout line, and that’s just what your dad happened to buy?” The answer to that is a resounding “yes”, but what’s important is that I gladly accepted that supermarket comic book because I loved the X-Men. And why did I love the X-Men? Because of television, of course.

Similar to how toddlers today may love Rocket Raccoon despite not being old enough to read a single one of his adventures, the Marvel machine was churning out a number of licensed shows for their key demographic back in the 90’s. X-Men and Spider-Man were the big ones of the Fox Kids line-up, but there were also Iron Man (which was basically stealth Avengers) and The Fantastic Four programs that no one seems to remember. Stan Lee introduced each Fantastic Four episode! He spoke Skrull! It was important! And on the DC Comics side of the aisle, we had the show that seemingly started it all: Batman: The Animated Series. I might have to turn in my nerd card for this, but B:TAS was not my favorite superhero show of the time, simply because it didn’t have nearly enough mutants with laserbeam eyes. I recognized the show was good, but give me some crazy nonsense with bright colors and dudes with four arms over “another Don Falcone episode” any day. The Adventures of Superman and the eventual Justice League series whet that whistle nicely, though.

And then there were the other superhero shows…

I suppose it started with the Disney Afternoon. The life and times of Scrooge McDuck and rescue rodents always got my attention, so when Darkwing Duck was introduced, I was 100% on board. As previously mentioned, I’m a sucker for bright colors and random “mutant” powers, so a purple-clad duck battling a fearful fiveful of elemental based bad guys (water, lightning, plant, dark, and… laughter?) may as well have pasted my eyeballs right to the ‘tube. Darkwing Duck, despite being ostensibly a comedy, was still very adventure-based, and it perfectly scratched those “hero” and “hilarity” itches. There was an episode where a scientist became a dinosaur! What more could I ask for?

And then Batman: The Animated Series hit the airwaves, and I was introduced to Batman for the first time. I was dimly aware of Batman before the show, but B:TAS was the “real” way I learned about Joker, The Waynes, and Alfred. Everything else had come from movie commercials or the NES game. Maybe I saw a Batman comic once before. Maybe.

So, in short, I watched Darkwing Duck, the obvious Batman parody, before I ever learned the details of “straight” Batman. Before I saw The Joker, I saw Quackerjack. Before I saw Batman go blind and fight Penguin, I saw Darkwing lose his sight and battle Megavolt. Years before I even heard of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, I saw a future Darkwing Duck ride around a dystopian St. Canard in a tank and enforce unrelenting vigilante justice. I saw all the parodies before I saw everything else.

And then there was The Tick.

The Tick is amazing. Comic book, animated series, live action series: whatever. It’s all good. Ben Edlund’s parody of superhero comics is spot-on, and without The Tick (in whatever form) we might not have The Venture Brothers or Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog or the other amazing superhero parodies of today. Hell, you can even see Edlund’s impact in more “normie” programs that have greatly influenced modern media, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, where the superhero formula is stretched and distorted, but you can still pick out your “capes” and “big bads”. … Alright, I might be cheating because Edlund worked on all those shows, but I’m pretty sure my point still stands. The Tick was funny and innovative on its own, but its greater impact on media at large seems disproportionate to the idea that most people only know the character from one Fox Kids show from the 90’s.

But it was that Fox Kids animated series that everyone in my generation (that was cool enough… yeah, that’s the ticket) watched. Batman was on every weekday, but Die Fledermaus appeared every Saturday. Superheroes had sidekicks, right? Like Arthur, the pudgy moth-rabbit man that had previously held a pretty good job in accounting. The Tick was invincible! Like Superman! He was also kind of dumb as a post, and his crime fighting catchphrase (“Spoon!”) wasn’t exactly “Avengers Assemble”. There was an episode where a scientist became a dinosaur! And who can forget the villainous The Human Ton and Handy? I mean, he’s no Chairface Chippendale, but who is?

But “Who is?” is the question.

Batman The Animated Series was a show for kids, but it was “serious” in that it took its Bruce Wayne and his many trials completely seriously. Spider-Man weaved the tale of Peter Parker and his many loves turned victims and/or supervillains earnestly. The X-Men lived in a world that hated and feared them, complete with at least one main character spending a season in jail as an example of peaceful protest. X-Men compared its big, blue champion to Ghandi! The Tick compared its similarly shaded hero to… a nitwit.

Darkwing Duck was a hero, but it was always front and center that he was primarily fueled by his ego. The Tick was indestructible, but, as Arthur often reminded us, his endless drive to save The City seemed to be (literally) crazy. The Tick’s superhero contemporaries seemed to be similarly… off… and I don’t think anyone wanted to grow up to be Sewer Urchin, hero or not.

So my entire generation (of nerds) watched Batman solemnly save the city, and then, a half hour later, The Tick did the same thing, but mocked the very idea of taking such a thing seriously. Week after week, rerun after rerun, we saw the hero rescue the world, and then we got a hero that laughed at that first hero. The moral, over and over again, was simple: caring about stuff is lame.

And it’s funny, because it’s pretty clear that the creators and writers of these shows loved superheroes. As Mel Brooks has proven repeatedly, you can’t parody something effectively unless you know the source material, and love is the quickest route to knowledge. The writers of Darkwing Duck may have vehemently hated continuity, but that’s likely only because they lived through The Phoenix Saga (that X-Men will be running through on their show this week). The Tick seems to be “Superman, but an idiot”, but you only get to write that after seeing Superman barbecue Jimmy Olsen’s favorite sweater. These parodies came from a loving place… but the cynicism that was conveyed to a virgin audience is palatable. Without the base, without coming to these shows as fans first, well, it all gets a little muddled.

And then, twenty years later, we’ve got an entire generation of people that don’t seem to believe in anything, and can barely distinguish between an elderly lady that can’t understand her email and a raging racist.

Number of players: Just one Tick. Arthur is a summonable “weapon”, at least.

Maybe actually talk about the game for a second: It’s a beat ‘em up. There seem to be a few interesting ideas in the opening areas, like rooftop hopping or optional mini bosses, but around the second level, it becomes an endless gauntlet of the exact same multi-colored ninja. There’s a glimmer of a neat idea in “back-to-back” hero-buddy summoning, but even that gets real old, real fast (and that particular power-up always seems to note the 2/3s point in the stage, so just seeing it means you have a ways to go).

But is it a “The Tick” game? Yes. The Tick has some amusing animations like leaping “gracefully” across rooftops and a finishing attack that is a finger flick. And some of the stars of the comic/show are here, like Chairface and The Idea Men. And occasionally The Human Bullet drops in and accidently causes damage to heroes and villains alike. There is, basically, a subtle undercurrent of “amusing” to the game.

But? But it’s still a tepid beat ‘em up, and you can only fight the same three ninja over and over again so many times.

Is The Tick at least “invincible”? You can toggle the continues and lives at will, and any defeat will lead to a restart right where you failed, so, actually, yeah. If you pump up The Tick’s lives count, you can probably easily make it to the end… but the boredom will stop you first.

Did you know? This game was apparently released very close to the Fox Kids premiere of The Tick. Likely as a result, there are a lot more characters in this that are comic-based than the “usual stable” of the animated series. It’s not like it’s a comics Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vs. animated TMNT situation, but you still see easy (lazy) parodies like Oedipus the Electra clone more than, say, American Maid.

Would I play again: I’ll watch The Tick over and over again until I die. I will not touch this game ever again.

What’s next? Random ROB has chosen… Blazblue Central Fiction. Hey, drawing from the end of the deck for once, robot? Is this a good thing? I guess we’ll find out. Please look forward to it!